The New H.265 Video Format Helps Chew Up Video So Networks Can Swallow It

Streaming video is the future. Well, it's the present, but the future too. And as resolutions increase, it's going to be a tougher and tougher proposition to pipe all that data to your screen of choice in a timely fashion. Fortunately, the new H.265 standard has been approved by the ITU and it's here to help.

Also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), the H.265 standard should make HD video streaming easier and could make even UHD (formerly known as 4K) streaming feasible whenever that becomes a thing that people have the content to stream and devices to watch it on. Ideally, new compression techniques that come along with the h.265 standard should make 1080p streaming possible while only requiring about half as much of the data that's required today.

On top of making it easier to stream increasingly high definition content, the new standard should also make it easier to stream stuff on less-than-zippy networks, bringing higher quality video content to mobile devices with less of a wait on buffering.

But of course, the effects won't be instant. Sure, software encoders are imminent, but we won't really start reaping the benefits until the standard gets adopted down in the chips. H.265 won't be able to shoulder the whole load of increasingly mammoth streaming video, but it should be able to lend a hand, and that's worth something at least. [ITU via Engadget]